If you are reading this post it means you are probably interested in trading cryptocurrency. Count yourself lucky, because you live in a time where an entirely new platform of technology is in its infancy. This means there is money to be made. A little about me, I have a masters (working on a PhD) in political-economy, former Wall St broker turned software developer.

I've been watching crypto since 2011 when I was a stock broker in NYC. At that time I was working on high frequency trading algorithms in equities, because even at that point, there was no point in trading manually any more. Then along comes crypto. It made immediate sense to me. But getting in was flippin' difficult. Your computer science degree needed a computer science degree just to figure out how to get a wallet. There was nothing intuitive about buying crypto. So I stayed on the sidelines for a few years.

As of the time of this writing crypto is in a 3rd phase.

They can be broken down like this:

Phase 1 - 2010-2016 justification

The world was asking "What is crypto?" Bitcoin was proving its existence and that people could understand and get behind the idea of a digital currency.

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Phase 2 - 2016-2018 the platform wars and the ICO craze.

A lot of scams, but this is where a few platforms and altcoins proved their metal and the constructs of the crypto universe were norming.

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Phase 3 - 2018-present Creating the ecosystem

establishment of blockchain, smart contracts, and NFTs. Aside from domain names, it is difficult to own a digital asset. You need to be able to prove ownership of something that is non-fungible, through a transaction that is fungible.

People should be realizing by now that NFTs are the scarce resource, bitcoin and altcoin are the fungible token used to purchase a resource, and smart contracts/blockchain are the proof of the transaction.

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Phase 4 - (future dates) the metaverse and the mass market

When it comes to crypto, the mass market isn't hear yet. I don't think that will happen until the metaverse is much more established and very very accessible.

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What the heck does this have to do with trading cryptocurrency?

Everything. You need to understand the fundamentals of the crypto market, as in... what are people actually buying.

The good news is, you are still very early which means there is plenty of money to be made. Being first pays big dividends. As a trader, you can ride the inevitable waves to come.

When it comes to crypto, what you are really investing in is this question:

Which coins (or blockchains) are going to be used to purchase (or power) resources that consumers will value in the future?

eg.

If alt coin A can be used to purchase a house and is accepted by nearly every real estate broker as well as convertible into several gaming tokens... that's pretty useful.

If alt coin B can only be used in one online game and isn't convertible into anything else... not very useful

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Right now the field is wide open, there are hundreds of altcoins and several blockchain technologies. Eventually, over several years, as humanity always does, a trusted few will come out of it. Hopefully you will have guessed correctly with your portfolio.

Over time I will post more on actual trading. I won't focus too much on fundamental analysis aside from this post, maybe what a project is and things on market adoption. For the most part I'll signpost or clarify aspects of technical analysis.

Hopefully some of it helps you on your journey.